Rodney Graham’s Unexpected Interrupters

Abstract

The works of Rodney Graham that are analysed in this article, Phonokinétoscope (2001), Super-Heavy Flute (2012) and The King’s Part (1999), are invitations to multiple understandings, references which are pointed to or affirmed taking the spectator onto unexpected ground. Whether from visual art, cinema, music, sound practices, literature or poetry, all these approaches are interconnected, as the works of Graham interweave different fields and temporalities. The boundaries between them are constantly pushed and their limits altered. The sound material that traverses his works, which can be suggested, silenced, interrupted, mute or broadcast at a high volume, prove the way Graham realizes the “mental gyration on the heel” described by Edgar Allan Poe, and a singular way of questioning the world.